Explore 15 user research methods beyond usability testing. We describe 5 scenarios where these methods offer a broad spectrum of insights for a better understanding of users.
Error messages can be a crucial point in the user experience. To be effective, they must be clearly visible, which can be accomplished by displaying them close to the error's source, using noticeable, redundant, and accessible indicators, designing them based on their impact, and avoiding displaying them prematurely.
Searching for a UX job and want an edge on your competition? Stop endlessly iterating over your portfolio and start practicing storytelling to ace your UX job interviews.
Manage your AI anxiety with two quick tips: small experiments and a news diet. Experiment with day-to-day communication and drafting with AI, as integrating AI into your research process. To avoid news overwhelm, subscribe to three weekly sources of information: a newsletter, an optimistic writing source, and a skeptical writing source.
Make user research and recruiting more efficient by keeping your own database of research participants. What’s important when choosing tools? What data should you store, and how should you govern the use of the database?
Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design. They are called "heuristics" because they are broad rules of thumb for UX and not specific usability guidelines.
Visualizing user attitudes and behaviors in an empathy map helps UX teams align on a deep understanding of end users. The mapping process also reveals any holes in existing user data.
Modern day UX research methods answer a wide range of questions. To know when to use which method, each of 20 methods is mapped across 3 dimensions and over time within a typical product-development process.
A website’s tone of voice communicates how an organization feels about its message. The tone of any piece of content can be analyzed along 4 dimensions: humor, formality, respectfulness, and enthusiasm.
Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.
Empathy maps, customer journey maps, experience maps, and service blueprints depict different processes and have different goals, yet they all build common ground within an organization.
What is design thinking and why should you care? History and background plus a quick overview and visualization of 6 phases of the design thinking process. Approaching problem solving with a hands-on, user-centric mindset leads to innovation, and innovation can lead to differentiation and a competitive advantage.
Our UX-maturity model has 6 stages that cover processes, design, research, leadership support, and longevity of UX. Use our quiz to get an idea of your organization’s UX maturity.
User interviews have become a popular technique for getting user feedback, mainly because they are fast and easy. Use them to learn about users’ perceptions of your design, not about its usability.
Eyetracking research shows that people scan webpages and phone screens in various patterns, one of them being the shape of the letter F. Eleven years after discovering this pattern, we revisit what it means today.
User interface guidelines for when to use a checkbox control and when to use a radio button control. Twelve usability issues for checkboxes and radio buttons.
Explore 15 user research methods beyond usability testing. We describe 5 scenarios where these methods offer a broad spectrum of insights for a better understanding of users.
Error messages can be a crucial point in the user experience. To be effective, they must be clearly visible, which can be accomplished by displaying them close to the error's source, using noticeable, redundant, and accessible indicators, designing them based on their impact, and avoiding displaying them prematurely.
Searching for a UX job and want an edge on your competition? Stop endlessly iterating over your portfolio and start practicing storytelling to ace your UX job interviews.
Manage your AI anxiety with two quick tips: small experiments and a news diet. Experiment with day-to-day communication and drafting with AI, as integrating AI into your research process. To avoid news overwhelm, subscribe to three weekly sources of information: a newsletter, an optimistic writing source, and a skeptical writing source.
Make user research and recruiting more efficient by keeping your own database of research participants. What’s important when choosing tools? What data should you store, and how should you govern the use of the database?
CSD matrices organize project information by Certainties, Suppositions, and Doubts. Use the framework to make decisions, form hypotheses, and address unknowns in discovery. (Credit: Tennyson Pinheiro, Luis Alt and the team at Livework São Paulo.)
Tabs and accordions organize and layer content on the same page. Tabs suit a few long sections, while accordions fit many short ones. Choose based on your content structure and user needs for optimal layout.
By first working independently on a problem and then converging to share insights, teams can leverage the benefits of both work styles, leading to rapid data analysis, diverse ideas, and high-quality designs.
Design systems are a set of standards (like Google’s Material Design or IBM’s Carbon Design System) needed to manage design at scale. Style guides (like content or visual style guides) are just one piece in a design system.
To get better results from generative-AI chatbots, write CAREful prompts. Include context, what you’re asking the system to do, rules for how to do it, and examples of what you want.
The need for discernment is amplified when generative AI enables anyone to create anything. Creative skills will still be necessary to produce superior designs.